A few days before I arrived in New York, it snowed here, as most residents are eager to point out, as they enjoyed today’s bright, sunny, 65-degree spring day. I naturally celebrated the great weather by burrowing indoors to take in two shows.
In the afternoon, it was Act One, James Lapine’s epic adaptation of writer-director Moss Hart’s 1959 autobiography of escape from the tenements of The Bronx to a celebrated, lucrative career on Broadway.
Like most starstruck youngsters who yearned for a life in the theater, this is a book that I devoured decades ago and was eager to see it live onstage. It mostly does, although even at a nearly three-hour running time, so much had to be jettisoned.
The first act covers a lot of ground, but does a great job of capturing the passion of a young man’s single-minded effort to break into the theater in some capacity. The second, less-successful act, focused in on the nuts-and-bolts of writing — and rewriting — Hart’s first big Broadway success, Once in a Lifetime, in which he met and first collaborated with George S. Kaufman.
The second act of Act One could still use some streamlining, but it contains a terrific comic performance by Tony Shalhoub as the idiosyncratic Kaufman, as phobic about germs as he is about sentimentality. Shalhoub, best known for TV’s Monk, is the go-to guy when it comes to playing cleanliness freaks. And in a production where nearly everyone takes on multiple parts, he also plays the adult Hart and his father.
If the first act has more to recommend it, that is because the estimable Andrea Martin — a Tony winner last season for her high-wire act in Pippin — has two choice roles. She plays young Moss’s influential Aunt Kate, who instilled in him a love and reverence for the theater, and also his theatrical agent, the tenacious Frieda Fishbein.
Whatever you think of the script, you are bound to be bowled over by the show’s set, a massive, multi-level turntable, which revolves to reveal the squalor of Hart’s roots, much onstage activity, Kaufman’s affluent digs and the lights of Broadway. It is the kind of lavish design work that only a Lincoln Center can afford.
Afterwards, I ducked into the Performing Arts Library to take in a nostalgia-rich exhibit on The Beatles (running through May 10). In the evening, I saw A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, a clever, cartoon-broad, music hall boisterous romp (book by Robert Freedman, music by Steven Lutvak) about one Monty Navarro, who discovers he is ninth in line for a lucrative earldom, so he proceeds to knock off all the relatives in his way. The program credits a novel by Roy Horniman as the source, but it plays a lot like the old Alec Guinness film comedy, Kind Hearts and Coronets.
And like that film, all the victims are played by a single actor — Jefferson Mays, Tony winner for the one-man tour de force, I Am My Own Wife. Who knew he had it in him to be a musical theater star, let alone such a comic talent?
Almost his equal is Bryce Pinkham as murderous Monty. And for those who yearn for a South Florida angle, note that supporting cast member Catherine Walker — Carbonell Award winner for The Sound of Music at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre a few seasons ago, understudies the female lead and went on in the role tonight, an opportunity to show off her soaring soprano voice.
A Gentleman’s Guide is an awful lot of fun, but here’s hoping I see something with more substance this week, more worthy of a Best Musical Tony.
Tomorrow: Harvey Fierstein’s Casa Valentina and off-Broadway’s Heathers, the Musical. Stay tuned.